I have always been fascinated with the way that cultures label things. For instance, when I was studying abroad in France, one of my professors was talking about bidonvilles, the equivalent of slums in English. I started talking to him about some bidonvilles that I knew of in the states and he quickly corrected me by saying that bidonville was only used for poor countries. In the U.S., these areas would be called ghettos (yes, it’s the same in French ?). I then asked him, “Either way, aren’t they places where low-income/poor people are concentrated?”

Same goes for the word immigrant. Anyone who comes to the U.S. from a different country is called an immigrant. However, when Americans emigrate to another country, they get labeled as expats. Good ol’ Webster defines an immigrant as “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence”. Now, I may be reading into this definition, but wouldn’t it apply in both instances?

See, what I find interesting in these examples is that it appears people create different words to describe the same thing out of discomfort and in most cases one sounds better than the other. So, while I’m living in Caracas I will be part of the “expat community”, even though my purpose there is no different than the Columbians or Bolivians that are automatically in the “immigrant community”.

By using these different labels, haven’t we just made one group of people feel better about itself by marginalizing another? What do you think about this practice? Are there any other examples of this that you’ve seen?

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